Salesforce the Beginning

Salesforce is a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solutions website, used by large and small companies and also enthusiastic individuals. Salesforce is a website which you login to and which will hold all your companies data and applications with user privileges. Using Salesforce is known as “cloud computing”.

What is cloud computing?

This is a big question at the moment. My understanding of it is, managing normal business processes online, for instance, accessing data and using applications. Instead of storing data and assessing applications on you own servers, your data is stored on Salesforce high security servers that are accessible online with a user login.

Some advantages of cloud computing:

• Low cost systems and applications with a monthly fee, you only pay for what you want e.g. traffic, bandwidth, users, memory and applications.

• Salesforce take care of upgrades, storage, and security.

• Updates do not affect systems already in place. (Everything will still work as normal after updates e.g. security).

• The systems and applications are fully customisable to improve and modify to benefit your needs.

• Straightforward application development with point and click settings.

For more information on Salesforce click here, also see video to understand cloud computing here.

My First Xactium Project

I have now officially started my placement from 1st July 2009 and I have developed a Newsletter application in Salesforce that is being used by Xactium. The current functionality of the newsletter is that a user can create a Newsletter by simply creating a newsletter instance by entering the title, issue name and date. Then, within the Newsletter you can add articles that each have a title and content. You can also add events that each have a event name and description. The user only needs to understand simple HTML to create the newsletter with links and lists. The newsletter design is created by a visualforce email template which adds the data that the user has entered to the newsletter. The user can submit the template by accessing the newsletter instance and clicking a custom button that finds all the leads and contacts that have subscribed to the newsletter, then clicking the send button. There is also the option of sending a test email to the user to check the result in an email provider. The same visualforce email template is used on the Xactium website to show all newsletters that have been processed and set live on the website.

See the newsletter here.

Thank you for reading. Please contact me for information about this blog.

Also see my website here